Regular blood sugar monitoring is essential for diabetics in order to enable their treatment, diet and rhythm of life to be adjusted to the respective requirements. Handheld instruments operating as mini-laboratories are available on the market for self-monitoring which allow the necessary steps to be carried out simply and rapidly even by laymen. In these instruments disposable test strips provided with a suitable test chemistry are held in readiness to enable a detection inside the instrument for example by an optical measuring unit after being loaded with capillary blood. A lancing device is attached to the instrument to facilitate blood removal which drives out a lancet with an adjustable stroke against a finger placed thereon. However, this requires that the user conveys sufficient blood from the puncture wound onto the test strip without contaminating the instrument as far as possible. The amount of blood that can be obtained at low puncture depths is often inadequate for conventional analytical systems whereas deeper punctures are very painful and lead to scarring of the sensitive finger tips. Another limitation is that the storage of test strips in magazines and their processing requires a large amount of constructed space and complicated drives.
In the EP Application Nos. 02026242.4 and 02028894.0 (corresponding to U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2005/0201897 A1 and 2005/0232815 A1) which were still unpublished at the time of this application, it is already proposed to use test tapes in the form of cassettes instead of individual test strips in order to apply body fluid to a section of tape that is preferably exposed over a tip and to analyse it. These applications give details about blood collection and the known test media and detection systems in particular for blood glucose to which reference is herewith made and the respective contents are incorporated into this application. However, the previously known systems do not describe the integration of sample collection into a test tape system having an automatic measuring process.